


In Last Hours

by beknighted



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Drabbles, I'm writing to cope with the finale let me live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 07:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11375004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beknighted/pseuds/beknighted
Summary: This is me, struggling fiercely with the Doctor Who Series 10 finale. Here's some stuff, some mercies, I have to get out. Obviously, spoilers.





	1. Hope

I am dying. I know that much. But who am I to be so certain? I've died before. I have burned like a thousand suns, I have blazed in cold agony, I have lived a living death, and I die every time I recall another name. The dead do not have faces, but they have names now. Yes. That seems right. 

I think of them in turn as I lie in an artificial Eden, Genesis serving as my Revelation. A beginning and an end. 

I am known only as Death on countless worlds. 

Funny really. 

I used to be frightened of the dark, and laugh at it, because I didn't know how to fight fear but with fierce joy. Now I am become the thing I always was. 

I loved him. This too I know. Of which him do I speak of? Doesn't matter. Time Lords have hearts enough for hatred and love in the same breath. I am vainglorious. I am smitten with fire and days without dawns. Am. Was. 

Damn. Poetry in the last hour. It is all the more beautiful for how pathetic it is, I suppose. No. There is a white flower beside me now, and I almost reach for it, but that is a cruelty. A flower picked is a cruelty, and a human one. I will not be cruel, not now. I will laugh at the dark one last time. 

Doctor. 

Did you die like a star? I thought you might. 

But not to my hand. I congratulate you. I hope that, in another life, you might have come to understand that I was standing with you when you fell, and I am fallen beside you now. We have fallen together. We fell where we stood. 

Enough. 

I have no witness. Are those children through the trees? And that funny little man? Yes. There. They will live, and that is a beautiful irony. But no witness to my silly sort of tragedy. All the better. 

I have no reward. But I can hear you, I can hear a certain waver as you say, "Good needs no reward. Good is a kindness. Kindness is courage." 

I have no witness, no reward, but I will tell you what I do have, Doctor. I do have hope. It is strange and awful and good. Yes. 

I can understand the danger of it, and your love for it. I can understand now. Doctor. It is dark now. Ever so very dark. 

But. Doctor. There is something. 

I am not afraid.


	2. Reward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This trio of sentimentality needed Bill.

Oh God. This is it then. I mean, it was it when I waited for you and you didn't come, and it was it when you did and everything was wrong, and it was it with you lying there, all bruised and broken and brave. But it's really it now. 

Wake up, old man. Or if you won't, Dream. 

I hope it's of nice places. Places you might have taken me. I'm not too disappointed, don't worry. I've been angry with you, and worried, and frightened, but you've never disappointed me. 

But do this for me, alright? When you wake up, and I know you will--maybe it will be after some kind of forever--do this for me? 

Keep going. Alright?

You told me once that you bothered with Earth because, in all the billions, there was someone like me. 

Well, I'm in love with living, this strange sort of living, this gift from Heather, because of someone like you. See, I've seen a lot because of you. I've felt more. I've learned. Maybe it wasn't that long for you, but. We ran. And I loved it. And thank you. 

I suppose this is my sort of goodbye. A silent one, but I mean it. 

I'll miss you, old man. God, I'll miss you. A great man, but a good one foremost. A kind one. And a bloody good tutor. Even when we missed lessons to save civilizations and all that. Thank you.

Thank you. 

I'm going now. I think I might be in love with someone? You'd know about this sort of thing. You'd give some kind of quip, apathetic and empathetic, both at once. You'd smile. Yeah, she's looking at me from across a whole universe, a step away. Definitely into that. 

I can see it all. A huge, spinning question of living, of going on. A blue haze of future. I can see it, like you can. 

And I will see it, like you did. 

Goodbye, Doctor.


	3. Witness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And I needed this small mercy.

Not again. Not ever again. I can feel it, a burning, a gold flickering on the edges of my eyes, a shift, like a blade or a shower of light, ah...I can't think. Bill. Bill. I can't live, or smile. How can I smile? 

I can feel a torrent of memory, I am speaking, I am begging for time, but who to beg? I'm not ashamed. But I am tired. I am finished. I will not change again. No! 

Every wave of regeneration energy will be fought. To the last. That is what this is. The last. Do you hear me? The last! 

The doors are opening. We have not gone far, I can feel it. But where? 

I am stumbling. Good. Only a fool doesn't stumble when he's lost it all, at the end, in the last hour. 

Oh. 

She is lying like Ophelia, under a tree, under years of it all. I can feel her going, an unreality. Another loss. 

Missy. I'm almost jarred to stopping, but I go to her, I force back that energy of life and cling instead to the dark tresses of an ending. 

Her eyes open.

"Doctor," she says, and that is all. 

"I understand," I say, but I can see that was the shape of the words she herself would have said. You came back.

You always did in the end. All those "stand asides" and "stand with me." We ran under the flaming skies, and we stood as a testimony. 

But we aren't standing now. We're falling. 

Your cheek is wet, and that isn't like you. Must be me. Or we surprise each other. Wouldn't that be nice? After all this time. But where there's tears there is hope. 

Did you have hope in the end? 

Did Bill? 

Bill, do that for me. For both of us. Have it. Hold onto it. For brave fools who don't know when to stand aside, and brave fools who do.


End file.
